New owners gut Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Maximillian Alvarez

Today we are going to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for an important and urgent update on the over-three-year strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the infuriating aftermath that has played out ever since striking members of the Newspaper Guild of Pennsylvania returned to work at the Post-Gazette in late November. The strike began on Oct. 18, 2022. In April, the Venetoulis Institute was going to buy out the Post-Gazette and take over the publication, which was set to cease operations at the beginning of May. And then on May 1, the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh posted a statement with the headline, ​“Incoming Post-Gazette Ownership slashes staff, purges former strikers,” and it reads, ​“the incoming ownership of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, is beginning its stewardship of the paper by cutting at least 40 percent of its staff and 80 percent of former strikers.” I’m joined on the show today by three guests: Andrew Goldstein, a now-former Post-Gazette education reporter and still-acting president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh; Helen Fallon, who was a longtime copy editor for The Post-Gazette and Professor Emerita at Point Park University in Pittsburgh; and Erin Hebert, a now-former copy editor and designer for the Post-Gazette and the first vice president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. I want to ask if we could have you each walk listeners through your own accounts of what has happened and what it’s meant to you to experience these events as they’ve unfolded.

Andrew Goldstein

We’re going to pick up the story from [January] when the former owners of the newspaper, the Block family, were intending to shut the paper down with the last day of publication being on May 3. We heard a lot of rumors, but very little definitively about a potential buyer.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one of the oldest newspapers in the country. It is the paper of record for Pittsburgh. It’s part of the fabric of Pittsburgh. So we were all upset, of course, to hear that the Post-Gazette might be closing. As soon as we heard that they were going to be shutting the paper down we got to work to try to do a couple of different things. One of those ideas was to try to find some new ownership. We also decided to start an exploratory group, which we call Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting (PAPER).

But we really didn’t hear anything except for rumors until early April, when finally we all were told that Venetoulis Institute was going to buy the paper. We were excited to try to find out more details. We talked about being cautiously optimistic, because pretty early on, we were hearing that job cuts were coming. What we’re seeing now is 40 or 50% of the newsroom slashed, and that’s just terrible. If you ask any journalist, they’ll say they feel like their newsroom is understaffed. And I certainly felt that way once the strikers returned. There was still news that I’m sure we wanted to cover that we just couldn’t get to. So now that it’s come to this, I’m really concerned what the future of journalism is going to look like in Pittsburgh.

Erin Hebert

The last four months have felt like being in a hostage situation. We’ve become incredibly resilient, and we knew that we would not be able to rely on the Block family or on the management structure at the Post-Gazette to do the right thing when it came to the Guild. We knew that we had to do something proactive. The Post-Gazette unit had been split in very real ways from the strike and from things that happened before the strike. It’s just been really disappointing in how it played out. It’s frustrating to know they kept 80% of the people who publicly disavowed our Union’s leadership, while simultaneously cutting 80% of the people who were on strike for three years, including people who who have dedicated decades to this newspaper. I hope that the city doesn’t suffer for it, and that the media ecosystem in Pittsburgh doesn’t suffer for it, and that’s what we’re working on right now with PAPER. We’re trying to be productive and build from the ashes of what we’ve done and what we fought for. 

Helen Fallon

If the union, the current employees management and the new management coming in would have worked together, we wouldn’t be talking about this today. There would have been a more equitable distribution of the initial jobs. I think they already know they need more people. This was such a rush job, I think there’s just a lot of mistakes. This couldn’t have been handled more poorly, and it just troubles me as someone who’s been in this business for a long time.

Alvarez

Please just help flesh out for folks, about what Pittsburgh would be losing if it continues to lose folks like you three and, even if a place like the Venetoulis Institute ends up bringing in this new model.

Goldstein

In terms of institutional knowledge, it’s a terrible loss. I don’t think that you can work at a place like the Post-Gazette for as long as any of us have, and ignore the fact that what makes it so great is not the name or the owners; it’s the people who work there. And a lot of us are Pittsburghers.

But it’s not just about us. It’s about the story of Pittsburgh itself. We are part of it, of course. But when you lose high school sports writers who have such a great knowledge of the kids here who end up going pro, where are you going to find their backstories? You have so many places, so many beats, from the arts to sports to news, where, when you lose that institutional knowledge, you just can’t get that back.

We are going to try to recoup some of that institutional knowledge and legacy as we move forward with PAPER, and we are in the throes of business development right now. There’s still no guarantees.

Hebert

This was my first professional newsroom job. Being from South Louisiana, I knew really nothing about this region before I got the job here. I learned very quickly that Pittsburghers love their city, they love their culture, and you better respect it and learn it if you’re going to fit in here. My response to that newsroom and the city welcoming me as an outsider was to respect that and to understand the labor history. Ultimately, I’m hopeful that some people in the city are going to be able to unite and maintain that institutional knowledge and the heart of what the Post-Gazette has been for decades, which is people who are rooted here and people who know each other. It’s a big, small town. And if you come in and don’t respect any of this place’s history, the history of the place that is literally called the cradle of the American labor movement, what do you expect us to do but call you out? 

Fallon

When I look on the website the last couple days, everything’s about Steelers, the Pirates, the hockey team and this and that. And people want that, but that’s not all they want. They’re going to have to figure that out, and I hope, bring back more people who have that knowledge and can constantly build because we left a lot of positions unfilled. The labor reporter took a buy-out, so there’s no labor reporter. Environmental, nothing there. You could keep going through a lot of beats, and that’s what happened, because they said they couldn’t afford it. We have to still respond to the community. We had a lot of problems with our Black community because of the way things were written and presented, and a lot of that still remains. The way you fix that is with some newer people, some older hands. People who know things, people who need to learn things. 

Alvarez

Was it worth going on strike? Do you have any messages for folks out there who are asking that question? Any advice that you have for folks listening about what they can do to support y’all, support the union and support PAPER?

Goldstein

Let me start out with PAPER. We have a lot of committees for people to join, but if you want to get involved, just check out our​pa​per​now​.org. There is a lot more information about what we’re doing, as well as a place to donate if you’re so inclined.

About how we feel about the strike now, I thought from day one that we absolutely did the right thing, and I’ve never changed my mind. We had to stand up for ourselves. The Post-Gazette, in the grand scheme of things, is small potatoes. But when you look and you see around the country, in the world, what’s going on here, if we’re not fighting these fights at this level, then where does this end?

Hebert

I will never regret going on strike, despite everything that happened. Ultimately, the strike taught all of us that we don’t need institutional validation to do the work that we do and to do good work. We’ve done that for the Post-Gazette. 

What we’re trying to do is explore a way to build something that has some greater form of immunity from the broader changes that have always hit places like Pittsburgh the hardest, these places that are constantly in these cycles of destruction and renewal. If the media apparatus within those places is vulnerable to bad actors, then how do we do that? We know that it’s ambitious with what we’re doing with PAPER specifically, but we know that it’s the right thing to do. We knew in 2022 this was what we had to do, and we had to figure out our motivations for staying out for as long as we did. We all have different reasons for what motivated us internally, but it’s all meant to serve our city in the place that we love and the place that we call home.

Fallon

We did save our little piece of the world, because we proved that a union can win. We won battles that will be part of other unions’ fights from here on in. What an accomplishment. You do as much as you can. My mother used to always ask me to be useful. You can’t think only of yourself. These union victories are so important, because that’s what this country needs right now. So I hope we are a great example for others to follow.

This episode of the Working People Podcast was published on May 7.